Marcham says the industry needs to understand that it is making a lot of money for jobs that, though often stressful, are not necessarily as important to society as others. He says it has a duty to give back "otherwise society will fail".
Setting up for success
Since inception Yellow Brick has had to battle through Brexit, Covid, and the current interest rate hikes, which have rattled the property market.
But Marcham says tough market conditions have naturally increased the value of a broker, while also changing their work.
"You're not going to go into your bank now and get the very best rate, because the rates aren't particularly competitive compared to what they would have been previously," he says.
"So searching around actually becomes more advantageous and therefore, we've seen business levels continue to rise. But for the individuals themselves, I can only say we're having to do different things to make sure they can afford to pay their mortgage."
Currently Yellow Brick brokers write a lot of remortgage business, while historically it has been mostly purchase.
He says: "The remortgage market is getting a lot more interesting; people want to contact you now six, seven months before worried about what their rate will be.
"And you're sort of doing damage limitation now and talking about ways they can keep their increasing mortgage down as much as possible, make it comfortable for them as best you can as opposed to old conversations where you were telling them how much they were saving per month, those days are finished unfortunately."
Despite the turbulent markets Yellow Brick has had a good run of client reviews on Trustpilot, which it uses to measure service levels, and hence business success.
The firm does not consider the number of mortgages written as a KPI and solely focuses on service, believing this means "you're going to always do right by the client".
Of the close to 4,000 reviews to date, almost all are 5 stars, with only a handful of 4 starts and two unfavourable ones.
"[Service] is the only thing we care about, so we don't manage [brokers] on how many mortgages they did last week or last month and we don't look at any management information around that at all.
"We just want to know that every customer they did deal with had an exceptional service and we validate that through Trustpilot and getting the reviews to validate that service," says Marcham.
